Field of the Invention. The present practice of restaurants in handling soiled dishes is to place them on trays and then put the trays on endless belt conveyors that carry the trays to the area where the dishes are washed in a commercial dishwasher. Frequently, the foreign matter on the dirty dishes will drain onto the belt conveyor and will cause the belt to give off an unpleasant odor unless time is taken to frequently wash the conveyor belt.
In my present invention I provide a motor driven endless tray accumulator in which a plurality of tray receiving racks are used and each rack is supported by a dolly frame. These dolly frames have wheels that ride in an endless oval track and adjacent dolly frames are interconnected and are moved so that the entire endless train of dolly frames with their tray supporting racks are continuously moved along the oval track.
Each tray rack has means for removably supporting trays of soiled dishes and a portion of the track is disposed adjacent to a second oval track that supports a train of dollies. The trays of soiled dishes are removed from the tray racks that are moving adjacent to the second oval track and the soiled dishes are placed in dish-carrying baskets supported by the dollies on this oval track where they are conveyed through a commercial dishwasher for washing, rinsing and sterilizing the dishes. If the operator is unable to unload all of the trays in a tray rack and transfer the soiled dishes to the dish-carrying baskets supported by the dollies, the accumulator will again carry the excess trays in their tray racks around the oval track and present the trays with the soiled dishes a second time to the operator for their removal from the racks and the transference of the dishes to the second oval track that supports the dish-carrying baskets. The basic invention is the continuous moving of an endless train of tray racks, each rack containing a plurality of removable trays with their soiled dishware and the individual removal of these trays by a bus boy who transfers the trays and soiled dishware to an adjacent conveyor with dishware receiving baskets, these baskets conveying the dishware and trays to a dishwasher. If the bus boy is unable to remove all of the trays of soiled dishware from a tray rack as it passes his position, the leftover trays and dishware will be moved around the endless train track a second time and past the same bus boy where he will be able to remove the remaining trays and dishes and transfer them to the baskets that carry the dishware and trays to the dishwasher.